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Month: December 2014

Two interesting reads that father Christmas delivered through my RSS feed this morning. Delay in posting is caused by two day-long open tabs.

Brion Shreffler visits The Raquet Club for Serious Eats to discover the secrets of Philadelphia’s best panettone. As huge fan of the good kind and eager to try baking my own one day, this is definitely saved for future reference. I should also try removing the top and adding vanilla gelatto before closing again.

This week brought a small Anadama (photos pending to write about it) and some muffins for snack, but the moment I was looking for came on Saturday, when I was to try a nice recipe for pizza dough. One that actually uses, hmmm, measures, as my other attempts were based on a YouTube video in Italian. Not that it went wrong. My previous pizzas were really good, but a random amount of water would require a random amount of flour and give me a random amount of dough/pies -usually two, but at times, we had to make the sacrifice of eating pizza for a few days.

After receiving friends over for coffee and corn cake (not my doing), I headed to the kitchen and started working that dough. Bonus points for my friend who brought a huge bottle of olive oil from his family in Greece. Perfect timing, as this ingredient required replacement.

For topping, I used tomato sauce (half-homemade), bocconcini cheese and portobello mushrooms. And since I still suck at opening the dough, I left my girlfriend in charge of that. Apart from a few holes in the dough, she nailed a thin pie with a somewhat thick border.

Ready to be opened

Ingredients

400 grams of flour

300 ml of water

3 tablespoons of olive oil

7 grams of active dry yeast

10 grams of salt

Directions

Mix the water with the yeast and let it rest for 10 minutes.

Add the olive oil and mix integrate all.

Add the salt and flour and mix it until all ingredients are combined. Let it rest covered with a towel for 20 minutes.
Knead the dough again until it is elastic. Let it rest covered with a towel for 45 minutes to 1 hour (it should double the size).

Shortly before the time has passed

Pre-heat the oven at 260° Celsius (500° Fahrenheit) with the baking stone inside.

Put the dough on a floured surface and press it gently to expel some air. Cut the dough in two and roll them (as picture above). You can let it rest again for a few minutes.

Put the dough for the pie you want to bake first on a floured surface and press it, then opening it with a rolling pin (I cannot open it decently it by hand, so don’t expect me to give you tips on that). If you have a pizza peel, do this part on it.

Cover the pizza with the topping of your choice and transfer it to the baking stone. If using the pizza peel, just transfer it to the oven; if not, it takes some skill to transfer it to the stone, but it is possible.
Bake it for about 10-12 minutes. Post a photo on Facebook and make your friends jealous.

Earlier this month, the company where I work had an office-wide Secret Santa. Since it was not mandatory, none of us in my department decided to participate (we’re the cool kids), but rather, we decided to make our own small-scale gift exchange, with one simple condition: it would either have to be homemade or cost about $30.
It was a no-brainer what I was going to make. We are all into eating and most are better than average cooks, so I decided to make savoury muffins. I had never made muffins before, but decided on cheese and tomato. A simple search took me to this recipe. Extra points were added for chives, which was already in my mind.
Last Wednesday I hit the oven for the first test batch using cherry tomatoes and mild raw milk cheddar. All that to make sure my colleague would get high quality baked goods and I am proud to say that I was happy with the results. They were a bit small, but I fixed that on the actual batch I made on Thursday by adding more raw dough to each spot of the baking tray. For secrecy reasons I did not post anything about it here before the exchange and for absent-mindedness, no pictures were taken of these two batches.
I still don’t know his take on the muffins, but human guinea pigs approved of the test batch. 50% of tested cats were satisfied with the results.
On Friday afternoon it occurred to me that savoury muffins could be a great solution for an issue I have: mid morning and mid afternoon snacks. Even though I do it sometimes, I don’t like buying ready stuff as I am not sure on all the ingredients – not because of allergies or alimentary fads, but simply because there are a few ingredients I don’t think add much to flavour. Curiously, these are the ones present in a lot of food ready to buy. That meant that Saturday was a day to try a new recipe.
Instead of bacon, tomatoes and chives, I went for sausage and black kale, whilst cutting down on the cheese.Muffins ready to be eaten for dinner on Saturday
The recipe is pretty similar to the one on Baking Mad, but here is my adaptation.

Directions
1. Cook the sausage and finely chop it. Wait for it to cool down before moving on.
2. Pre-heat the oven at 190 Celsius (374 Fahrenheit). Mix in flour and baking powder and then add the sausage, cheese, kale, sugar and salt. If using a mixer, turn it on and let it do the job while you do step 3.
3. On a pan, melt the butter, add in milk and the eggs and mix all of them.
4. Add the liquid mix to the solid and integrate all into a dough.
5. Put the dough in a muffin baking tray and bake it for 30-35 minutes.
6. Eat, rinse and repeat.

The title is a half-truth.
I make two to three types/loaves of bread per weekend so they will last for the whole week (or most of it). This weekend, though, I was worried about completed my first loaf using 100% homemade sourdough starter -there will be a post on it -which means that Monday 8:something, after I arrived from work and had dinner, there was just a piece of Pain de Campagne and I decided to make more bread.
Going through the book I use the most for bread recipes, Pains du Monde a faire Soi-même, I decided on Scottish Morning Rolls, which are simple, do not require a long time fermenting and I had done before.
The recipe requires only 400 grams of white flour, 150 ml of water, 150 ml of milk, 20 grams of fresh yeast (or 7 grams of the dry) and 10 grams of salt. Leave flour and salt on a bowl, mix the water, milk and yeast, and add the liquid to flour. Integrate them well, leave it to grow for 1 hour.The raw dough ready to be baked
Once it grows, cut it into 10 parts, roll each of them and open with a rolling pin. Put the 10 small loaves on one (or two) baking trays, cover and leave them for 30 extra minutes. Meanwhile, pre-heat the oven to 200 Celsius (that’s 395 Fahrenheit). Bake for 15 to 20 minutes and your small and delicious bread is ready.
This is a great bread for breakfast (as the name suggests), but also with a slice of your favourite type of cold cut with a little bit of cheese. However, nothing beats getting the bread freshly out of the oven, open in two with just some butter on it.Bread and butter time!

I have mentioned on my previous (and first) post about my first baking adventures, including “cuca de banana”, a typical cake from the south of Brazil. The recipe I used is long lost, as I probably gave away the book that contained it before moving to Canada.
Luckily there is wonderful/terrible thing called the Internet, so I placed a search and ended up with an excessive number of recipes for the cake (changing bananas to apples, as it is cold and I was lazy to go out). Going through the ingredients in the top results and automatically discarding any that mentioned margarine, I locked on this one (link in Portuguese, but I’ll post it in English below).

My recipe holder -at least during winter when the rosemary, parsley and lavender are in the kitchen.

No lemons were harmed in the making of this recipe -laziness to go out striking again. The recipe itself if very straightforward. Just add everything in the mixer following the right order, let the dough rise, cover with apples (or any fruit) and bake. As it is usual for me, I used less sugar than what the recipe asked for, so this cake could go well with either a nice cup of coffee or probably pork -if the caramel is removed. Speaking of caramel, that was my first attempt at it and as punishment, I’ll have to spend three hours a day this week reading the Larousse des Desserts by candlelight, whilst kneeling on corn. I guess I’ll have to try that again sometime.
And this is the final result. The topping is a bit bitter due to the caramel, but overall, I’d call it a success.

1. On the mixer’s bowl add the yeast to water. Let it rest for a couple of minutes and add the sugar. Leave it alone for 10 minutes.
2. Add the egg, butter, and lemon zest. Mix everything and start adding the flour with the salt little by little, until the dough is homogeneous, but not too firm.
3. Spread the dough in a greased and floured baking cake pan.
4. Let it grow for 30 to 50 minutes, go learn how to make proper caramel.
5. When the time is up, add the apples to the top, thinly sliced with any other ingredients of your choosing (nuts, caramel, raisins…)
6. Set the oven to 150 degrees Celsius (305 degrees Fahrenheit) and bake for 35 to 40 minutes.
7. Enjoy!

I have started cooking relatively late in life, starting 12-ish years ago with a cup of coffee so I could prepare a birthday breakfast. Since then I’ve read a lot about cooking and how to mix ingredients and spices to create new dishes and I like to think that I do a pretty good job when using the stove and oven.
Although I still enjoy cooking and do it almost every weekend, since about a year ago I have been in love with baking. Maybe it’s because there are so many reactions going on (you have several ingredients in different formats and end up with something that does not resemble any of them individually; there’s yeast converting sugar into carbon dioxide).
My first baking adventures involved a typical Southern Brazilian cake called “Cuca de Banana” (literally Banana Cake, through the German Kuchen), as well as sweet bread made with Arracacia xanthorrhiza, which is one of my favourites to this day, but implies in too much work (cooking the vegetable, mashing it, mixing everything, fermenting it). Up north I replace the main ingredient with potatoes (beets work well too), but since I fell in love with baking I have not tried this recipe again, rather trying new ones from Pains du monde à faire soi-même, which I got at a very good deal last summer.
The book contains one hundred recipes and about a month ago I decided I’ll give all (or most) of them a try. Everything has been set up on a spreadsheet and every week I enter the information on which types of bread were baked. So far I am at 11.
This is intended to be a long time project for one of my hobbies, the one I am most excited about (at least for the moment), as it gives to so many options to experiment and create. I am not a professional and have never formally studied anything related to cooking, so I make mistakes and will probably post when they happen. This way I can also track my improvement when I retry the recipes that did not quite work out.